Online Dating Reveals Political Polarization — Even in Romance

If you’ve ever used an online dating website, you’ve answered a litany
of questions about yourself and your ideal match, and maybe even about
your political affiliation. Although this information is sometimes
hidden from view, new research shows that time and time again men and
women choose to pursue romantic connections with people from their own
political party and with similar political beliefs.

This was one of the key findings that emerged after Neil
Malhotra, Stanford Graduate School of Business associate professor,
and Gregory
Huber, political science professor at Yale University, analyzed
thousands of interactions from an online dating website. Their findings,
presented in a research paper titled “Political
Sorting in Social Relationships,” show that political affiliation
rivals education level as one of the most important factors in
identifying potential mates.

“We underestimate how much politics affects our daily lives,” says
Malhotra. “After an election is over, we don’t think about it, but in
fact our political affiliations strongly affect other aspects of our
lives, such as our romantic choices.” And that has important
implications beyond the households that politically similar individuals
may form, he says.

“At the highest levels within our political system, we increasingly see
that people are unwilling to work and communicate with each other,” he
observes. “Simply put, our society has become more and more polarized,
and we wanted to explore if political preferences in romantic
relationships could begin to explain part of the divide in America.”

As Malhotra explains, when people pair with individuals of similar
political beliefs, their households can become echo chambers that
transmit extreme views to the children. In fact, research shows that
children are more moderate if their parents have differing political
viewpoints. There is a genetic story at play, as well. Studies of twins
demonstrate a genetic predisposition for certain political beliefs,
which suggests that offspring of like-minded individuals may be
predisposed to more extreme beliefs.

With this context in mind, Malhotra and Huber embarked on a laboratory
experiment in which they presented participants with online dating
profiles. Participants evaluated profiles more positively (e.g. had
greater interest in dating the targeted individual) when the target had
their same political ideology and level of interest in politics. Study
participants even found online candidate profiles more physically
attractive if they shared similar political beliefs.

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To validate these results, the researchers then formed a partnership
with an online dating website, which provided the team a unique window
to observe people’s beliefs and preferences before they meet and
interact in a marriage market. It also provided a wealth of data since,
according to a Pew Research study, 74% of single Americans seeking
partners have used an online dating site.

The team developed a set of seven new questions that users were asked
when signing up for the online dating service. The questions measured
three different political characteristics: political identity, including
party affiliation; issue positions; and political participation. Most
users opted to keep their answers to these questions private, meaning
that other users could not proactively search for potential mates using
these criteria.

Nevertheless, after assessing how men and women interacted via the
site’s messaging function, Malhotra and Huber found that — in line with
the results from the lab study — shared political characteristics
increased the messaging rates in statistically significant ways above a
baseline rate. Shared partisanship increased messaging rates by 9.5%,
shared levels of political interest increased messaging rates by 10.7%,
and shared ideas about how to balance the budget increased messaging
rates by 10.8%.

These are similar to the messaging boosts found from shared educational
background (10.6%) and height (9.8%); slightly lower than race (16.6%);
and lower than religion (50%). However, since political characteristics
were not disclosed — unlike these other publicly disclosed
characteristics — it shows “how strong the political effect is, and how
easy it is for people to pick up on cues about political beliefs,” says
Malhotra.

Unlike other research in the field, which demonstrates that shared
political preferences develop after a relationship is formed,
Malhotra and Huber have, in fact, uncovered that shared political
preferences actually precede the formation of romantic
relationships. This kind of “sorting” reduces political disagreement
within the household, which, in turn, risks the creation of homogenous
political enclaves. The bottom line? According to Malhotra, “Partisan
polarization could get much worse.”

When asked what might help combat some of these effects, he says that
interaction between people of differing viewpoints, backgrounds, and
identities could help mitigate political polarization. It’s been
suggested, for example, that racial integration in the workplace has
resulted in greater tolerance. If schools and colleges give more
attention to political discourse, it might have the same positive
effects, he observes. On a larger scale, says Malhotra, our systems of
political districting create extreme enclaves of like-minded people — a
problem that needs to be addressed if we want to have any hope of
changing the national political conversation.

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